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Another thing that pointed to her being a possible Good German was that she could never decide which part of a Crosby, Stills, and Nash song to sing. She just went for the next available note. This said dark things about her latent tendency toward collaboration, as did the fact that when it came right down to it, she really, really liked Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
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Frightening, too, was her suggestibility. Back in 1999, she had watched five episodes of The Sopranos and immediately wanted to be involved in organized crime. Not the shooting part, the part where they all sat around in restaurants.
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Worst of all, there was the Incident. When she was eight, she had been exploring a creek with her little sister and brother and had idly dropped a pebble into a hollow tree trunk. The day set up a high-pitched whine, the horizon rolled into a cloud, the sun grew a stinger, and bees swarmed: they were in her eyes, ears, armpits, fair hair. She stumbled up over the creek bank, windmilling her arms, and raced home, but by the time she reached her front door the bees had reversed neatly back into their hive; the welts melted off her body; it was as if it had never happened. An hour later, her mother asked, “Honey, where . . . ,” and together they ran to them, her sister’s body flung over her brother’s, both of them nearly stung to death, waiting for the help that was sure to come, honey, honey, where?
* * *
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Experience: I was swallowed by a hippo
“There was no transition at all, no sense of approaching danger. It was as if I had suddenly gone blind and deaf”
A few years ago, she thought, that story would have made a sensation. It would have been all anybody talked about for weeks: the sudden breach, the tooth of a new reality against the rib cage, the greeny-black smell of being lost in some ultimate aquarium. But now they had all been swallowed by a hippo. Big deal. That’s life.
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“You have a totally dead look on your face,” her husband observed, as he watched her engage in mortal online combat with a person who had chosen, out of all combinations of words in the universe, the username henry higgins was an abuser. “Like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Like a doll that haunts kids. Just totally, totally dead.” Her feelings, such as they were, were hurt. He was always saying things like this just when she was at her most alive.
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Her cousin, born the odd year before her, was autistic, at a time when they still blamed refrigerator mothers. Before he got too strong and was sent away, her aunt had built for him in the basement of her mansion a miniature kitchen. It was thought, somehow, that this bright and well-ordered corner of verisimilitude would help him break into real life. Little T-bones, shaped like South America, dewy ears of corn, false cans with actual labels. But he cared nothing for this, he cared only for music, he slapped his temples to the pulse, and as he grew taller and turned the beat louder and louder it became clear they had it all backward: real life was in him, trying to burst the miniaturization of the body, little T-bones, dewy ears.
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Something else, something odd: that they made him wear a little computer around his neck, with all the letters of the alphabet on it though he was nonverbal. They believed he would be led, either by the desire in their faces, or the holiness of the random, or some force of insistence in English itself, to eventually type what they called a real word.
* * *
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That the unmeaning machine would one day produce a phrase like Europe.Is.A.Fag, and that the next time she saw her father, he would, with utter seriousness, while placing a hand on her shoulder and staring earnestly into her eyes, pronounce the words Europe.Is.A.Fag, while waiting for the bell of resonance to ring in her too. That after all, her father would say, pointing to the unmeaning machine, it was the only one that told the truth.
That she might stand there speechless, then turn to her own unmeaning machine for a response, accept the piece of paper it spat happily into her hand, and tell him to go suck a poison pussy, sweetie
* * *
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Was it entirely his fault? Lately it seemed every man on the planet was about to burst from a supplement sold to him by another man with exactly the same set of opinions. “Mom, I want you to check Dad’s medicine cabinet,” she said one day during her weekly call. “Check and make sure he’s not secretly taking some supplement with a bullshit name like Destroy Her with Logic 5000 + Niacin.”
A coughing fit interrupted her interrogation; one of her morning nootropics had lodged sideways in her throat, and there was no washing it down for love or money. As it subsided, she heard her mother striding briskly down the upstairs hallway, heard her opening the mirror that cut your face in two. “I don’t see anything—why do you ask?”